Friday, April 17, 2009

Villa de Leyva is a colonial town about 3 hours north of Bogota. Cesar and I went there on our Christmas/New Year's trip and I never blogged or posted pictures of it, so here they are. It's a beautiful and charming little town where you can find great food and lots of fun things to do and also the largest town square in all of Colombia. This is a picture of Cesar when we were headed up in a taxi to go see a waterfall nearby. We'd already been biking and hiking that day, so we didn't feel bad for a minute hiring a taxi to take us up there. Actually, we'd intended to go on a bus tour, but found that a taxi was about the same price. The taxi driver we hired asked us if his girlfriend could join us, we said that'd be fine, and as we were talking to them (well, Cesar mostly because my Spanish is still lacking) it turned out that the girlfriend used to be a nanny in Chicago. That was the first and probably the only time I'll meet a Colombian who lived in the town we're from.

Here I am at the top of a waterfall. The view looking down was amazing and I remember being pretty scared that I might slip and fall. I also kept having visions of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive jumping down the waterfall to escape Tommy Lee Jones.

This is the town square in Villa de Leyva, well one part of it. It's huge. The whole town has cobblestone streets, which makes for a very charming visit, but is tricky to walk on and even trickier to roll your big suitcase on!

One of the days we were there, we rented bikes (from a group of 12 year olds who were playing video games in their store.) When they decided to pause the game, we were able to rent bikes for about $5.00 for a few hours from them. Of course, they had to adjust the seat heights for us because we are big, tall North Americans. We started biking through the mountainous area where on one side you could look down into a ravine and the other side was a mountain. We rode to an ostrich farm, the ride down the hill was so much fun, we were flying. What we forgot about was that we'd have to ride back up the huge hills afterward. I think we pretty much walked the bikes back up those hills.

At the ostrich farm, this was as close as we'd get, those suckers are monstrous! The guide told us they are attracted to bright colors such as reds and yellows, so I was nervous that it was going to peck at my hair the whole time. It didn't.

The tour guide, another teenager, informed us that it was perfectly okay to pet the ostriches. She was also so kind as to warn us that one swift kick from an angry ostrich could kill a human being. That was reassuring. They are pretty animals though, at least I think so. I love their long eyelashes, which are used for artificial ones sometimes.